Recycling is a Load of Crap – Shove It “America Recycles Day!”

Recyling is just a load of crap foisted consumers and municipalities. Saturday is America Recycles Day, so expect to see a lot of “we are the world” commercials about how important it is for everyone to separate their plastics drag them to the curb so the city recycle truck guys can sort it again and haul it to the recycle center where it sorted, loaded on a truck and hauled somewhere else and sold. The raw materials are then sold to container makers and the circle of crap begins again.

It’s a recycling party! Nov. 15 is America Recycles Day–the only nationally recognized day dedicated to encouraging Americans to recycle and to buy recycled products.

Corporations produce disposable containers, we buy them, but we also take care of getting rid of the “producer waste.” When disposable bottles were first introduced, citizens realized there was a cost to them to get rid of the producer crap. Many thought it would be a good idea to put a deposit on each container. Seems logical: if I don’t want to send back a container for reuse, I pay more. If somebody wants to take my reusable container they can get some money for their commitment.

Funny thing: the grocery stores and container producers didn’t want their containers back! The grocery stores said it would cost them money to store and return the reusables. The producers said they didn’t want them because it would cost more for them to reuse the container.

Reuse is often confused with recycling, but they are really quite different. (Even those engaged in reuse frequently refer to it as recycling.) Reuse in the broadest sense means any activity that lengthens the life of an item. Recycling, on the other hand, is the reprocessing of an item into a new raw material for use in a new product–for example grinding the tire and incorporating it into a road-surfacing compound.

The container makers invented the term: “litter” and suddenly we had a national crisis for controlling litter.

Recycle. Reduce. Reuse. Kids are learning these three R’s.

Recycle Rebound. Reduce. Reuse. should be what the kids learn. Rebound the containers to their place of origination to be reused.

Imagine this: all the soda/pop/beer/water bottles become returnable, and/or have a deposit attached! That alone would be a massive improvement!

UPDATE: Those newspapers you have been so dutifully hauling to the curb? They are being baled and sitting in the same warehouses full of plastic, with no place to go:

Stacks of baled paper, plastic and metal are mounting at the Sacramento Recycling & Transfer Station plant on Fruitridge Road because market prices are too low to turn a profit or, worse, no buyers can be found, its operators said.

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Comments

I share this opinion 100%. “Recycling” is a bullshit concept drilled into an entire generation’s mind as a way to deflect the responsibility for disposing of useless packaging away from the makers and onto the consumers.

Once again, Corporate America has found a way to get away with whatever it wants and foist the responsibility onto the end user.

@Brian: thanks for agreeing with me, you are a smart man. @Catch Her In The Wry: Nancy says the same thing about glass – refeuses to drink anything from plastic – unless glass is too unhandy! She doesn’t even like cans. I am all for paying a deposit on returnables.

I think you are right on with this. If we had returnable bottles and cans there would be not a speck of litter in my local park – the local druggies and youths would be taking them back to earn the money! Much better idea.